A letter addressed to the board of trustees of the Artwork Gallery of Ontario (AGO) by the Toronto-based Indigenous Curatorial Collective (ICCA) is demanding solutions concerning the circumstances of curator Wanda Nanibush’s sudden departure final November. The letter, titled “Let Wanda Communicate”, requests that “the AGO launch Nanibush from any authorized obligations stopping her from talking publicly about her tenure and dismissal, about how she sees what occurred and why”.
Information that Nanibush, the primary Canadian and Indigenous artwork curator on the AGO, was leaving the establishment shocked the Canadian artwork world. The information was linked to a leaked letter accusing her of “posting inflammatory, inaccurate rants towards Israel”. That letter, verified by Hyperallergic and The International and Mail, was despatched to the AGO by Israel Museums and Arts, Canada (IMAAC), an organisation set as much as help the Israel Museum and Israeli grassroots arts organisations, on 16 October. It was signed by members of IMAAC’s management workforce.
The letter accused Nanibush, who was a jurist for the current 2023 Sobey Artwork Award, Canada’s main up to date artwork prize, of “hate speech,” citing an article she wrote for the now-defunct Canadian Artwork journal that drew hyperlinks between the Indigenous Canadian and Palestinian expertise. In it she wrote, “Colonisation marks a earlier than and after the place identification is radically altered by loss.”
Since then greater than 3,400 Canadian artists, writers and cultural employees have signed three separate letters criticising the AGO over Nanibush’s dismissal. These included an open letter to the AGO with greater than 3,300 signatures that started with an expression of “outrage on the current push out of Wanda Nanibush from her place” on account of “the bullying of the museum by pro-Israel artwork collectors and donors”.
A second letter, entitled “A Assertion of Concern from Members of the Worldwide Arts Group to Establishments Worldwide”, was signed by greater than 50 Indigenous artists, curators and professors from Canada and world wide. A third letter, revealed on 28 November and signed by 44 Governor Normal Award-winning artists, additionally referred to as for accountability from the AGO: “The pressured departure of Wanda Nanibush is an act of political censorship with shades of a brand new McCarthyism.”
In an open letter revealed subsequently, on 30 November, AGO director Stephen Jost wrote: “The AGO, together with many different cultural establishments, is being requested to higher outline the rights and limits of political and inventive expression in a regionally numerous however globally complicated atmosphere. We are going to undergo a course of to pay attention, to know a number of views after which collectively we’ll articulate our institutional place.”
This response was unsatisfactory to the ICCA, whose letter criticises Jost’s for “apparently assum[ing] the Indigenous arts group will probably be keen to work with the AGO sooner or later—that the harms precipitated are targeted on Nanibush alone and that her dismissal doesn’t tremendously have an effect on us all. […] We require transparency and inclusion, belief and respect, if we’re to proceed on this journey collectively. For us, the primary, obligatory and most blatant step is to know what occurred and why.”
The letter ends with a requirement for a response by 31 January. “If we don’t hear from you by this date, we’ll contemplate different choices which might be arising from ongoing conversations inside Indigenous arts communities.”
Nanibush declined to touch upon this matter and the AGO had not returned calls and emails from The Artwork Newspaper as of press time.
In a press release, the Lebanese Canadian artist Jamelie Hassan—a winner of the Governor Normal Award and signatory of the third letter—criticised the museum for silencing Nanibush by means of a non-disclosure settlement.
“No artist ought to be pressured to muzzle their political views, nor be restricted from discussing makes an attempt to silence them by means of such odious authorized mechanisms,” Hassan stated. “Ontario is contemplating passing laws to outlaw non-disclosure agreements which stop a sufferer of discrimination, harassment or sexual abuse from discussing the small print of the incidents. Non-disclosure agreements designed to squash political concepts ought to be handled the identical.”
